Fans of Sherlock Holmes may recall Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 story “Silver Blaze” in which Holmes solves a case by noticing what didn’t happen: a stable dog that should have barked at a midnight intruder stayed silent. Holmes called it “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Forty years later, a Fox Terrier in New Jersey gave the fictional Holmes’s line a real-life case.

Few people alive today remember May 1927, when a lanky young airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island and landed at Le Bourget Field outside Paris 33 hours and 30 minutes later. It was the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic, and it made him one of the most famous men in the world. His accomplishment lives on in history, and the plane he flew, the Spirit of St. Louis, still hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

But another event is tied to the famous pilot, and it was tragic.

On the cold, windy night of March 1, 1932, someone leaned a homemade ladder against the Lindberghs’ new house near Hopewell, New Jersey, and kidnapped their 20-month-old son, Charles Jr., from his second-floor nursery. His nurse, Betty Gow, found the crib empty at about 10 p.m. A ransom note demanding $50,000 sat on the nursery windowsill. The family usually spent only weekends at Hopewell, but Lindbergh later testified that they had stayed on that week because the baby had a cold.

Dogs had been part of Lindbergh’s life since boyhood. As a boy he had a Fox Terrier named Wahgoosh, and the family’s black-and-white Fox Terrier at Hopewell carried the same name. The household also had a Scottish Terrier named Skean, who reportedly slept under the baby’s crib. Skean wasn’t at Hopewell that night. Wahgoosh was, and no one heard him bark.

The Lindberghs paid the $50,000 ransom through a go-between, but the child was never returned. Two months after the kidnapping, his body was found in woods a few miles from the house. More than two years later, a ransom bill traced through a license plate number led police to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a carpenter. More ransom money turned up in his garage, according to the FBI, and he went on trial in Flemington, New Jersey.

The terrier came up during the trial too. On cross-examination, Lindbergh called him “a little fox terrier” who was “very nervous,” and said, “I don’t recall hearing the dog bark that night.” Elsie Whateley, wife of the household’s caretaker-butler, said the dog would bark “as a rule, but the wind was so bad that night you couldn’t hear anything.” She testified that he spent those hours in his basket in the staff sitting room, at the far end of the house from the nursery. Betty Gow said that when strangers came to the door, “as I remember it, he did” bark.

Defense attorney Edward Reilly made a Holmes-style argument from that silence. In his closing, he called Fox Terriers “the snappiest, scrappiest” watchdogs alive, asked who controlled the dog’s movements that night, and answered his own question: “The butler.” The silent terrier, he argued, proved the crime was an inside job.

The jury wasn’t persuaded. On February 13, 1935, it found Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder, and he was executed more than a year later. Debate over the case has never fully ended.

Wahgoosh didn’t fail anyone that night. He was a household companion dog in a basket at the far end of a large house, with a strong wind howling outside, and by the household’s own account he barked at strangers who came to the door. Doyle could arrange his fictional stable so the deduction worked perfectly. We find that real life is rarely so tidy. Holmes would have called the terrier’s silence curious, but at Hopewell, curious was as far as the evidence went.

Image of a Fox Terrier named “Tesa” by George Dulishkovych/Unsplash